At the time I chose this reading for my extra credit reading, I was reading the excerpt from Bagdikian’s Media Monopoly. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was a good link to the idea of social control but with a different spin. In this Chapter, A Social History of American Technology, Cowen speaks about the various efforts to try to control electronic communications, only to have it continue to manifest itself so that no one individual, company or component dominates for very long (although it’s made a lot of people very rich!). She cites 3 reasons for this:
- Amateurs and innovators are attracted to electronics, therefore when something is invented, there is always someone else trying to do it faster, bigger and better…and they do!
- The Federal Government played a role in decentralizing technology for a variety of reasons. One of the key reasons is the catalyst of war. The government needed technology to solve their problems, so they would open up the request for such technology to multiple sources, creating competition and innovation.
- Through disrupting technology, competition (a result of our free market economy) is always around the corner with improvements and better technology to solve customers’ problems, looking for the next big thing to make them rich!
In this paper I focus on #3 as this article signaled several instances where disruptive innovation theory was at play.
Clayton Christensen speaks about the drivers of innovation. In his book “Seeing what’s Next”, he states “government tries to identify and address market failures and increase the pace of innovation within an industry” (Christensen, 2004). In Cowen’s book, one of the key drivers of innovation was war. During WWII, there was a need for electronic computers to calculate the right variables to enable the guns firing tables. This was extremely difficult and time consuming to do. Initially women with college degrees in Math were hired to compute the tables, but this took too long. An enterprising engineer suggested that he build an electronic calculator that would ultimately solve the problem in seconds, rather than hours. From this point on, moving from WWII to the Cold War, the need for faster electronic calculators continued to increase. What followed diminished any social control that was the hope of the original developers of the technology. Through a conference, the government reached out broadly to encourage further development of the computers, which stimulated competition and furthered innovation. Some developed the technology, others made money at it, and yet others improved and enhanced it.
Another meaningful parallel to Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory is demonstrated by Cowen, in her account of the birth of radio broadcasting. Cowen shares with us how RCA and its allies were trumped by Westinghouse when Westinghouse ran with the idea that the potential market for receivers was potentially huge. If they could manufacture them, they could conquer the mass market. Westinghouse began broadcasting music, elections, and baseball games from its factory rooftops and radio broadcasting was born. At the time, RCA, as the incumbent, saw early on the potential for radio, but the management was so focused on setting up RCA in business that they had little time to develop the idea.
The social control pendulum continued to swing as RCA brought Westinghouse into the folds of its consortium, which eventually led to the creation of the first media network, NBC. And it forever continues to swing, through government led regulations and anti-trust laws.
- Reflecting on the previous reading by Bagdikian, what obstacles to social control will the networks potentially face in the future?
- With the internet still in its early years, what kind of regulation can we envision that will begin to put social control on the internet and what will the impact be?
- How much control should the government have on the creation and distribution of social content?
Christensen, C. (2004). Chapter 4: How Nonmarket Factors Affect Innovation. In C. Christensen, Seeing What’s Next (p. 73). Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing Corp.
Teri, this is an excellent synthesis of several readings and ideas from the class!